Second Amendment Foundation press release:
BELLEVUE, WA – The Second Amendment Foundation today has filed a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request with the City of New York for all records relating to Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns, after newspaper allegations that city resources have been used for MAIG’s gun control efforts. SAF is being joined in the request by the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, and Tom Gresham, host of the nationally-syndicated “Gun Talk.” “It was bad enough to learn via CBS News that the MAIG website was being hosted on a city-owned server, and administered by city employees,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan Gottlieb, “but it also appears that a special counselor in the mayor’s office was sent to lobby in Nevada on behalf of MAIG’s gun control agenda.” . . .
The New York Post and Politico both published reports that Mayor Bloomberg sent Christopher Kocher to Nevada, and that in an apparent attempt to conceal who he worked for, Kocher “scrubbed his City Hall e-mail address from the state of Nevada lobbying-registration Web site early this month.”
“The public has a right to know what’s been going on between Bloomberg, the city and MAIG,” Gottlieb explained. “Gun control is Bloomberg’s pet peeve, and he’s been pushing an anti-gun agenda since sending so-called private investigators on a sting operation to gun shops all over the country, which got him in trouble with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.”
“There certainly appears to be a serious problem in Bloomberg’s administration,” Gresham added. “Evidently, the mayor and his staff have a gross misunderstanding of how the taxpayers’ money should be spent, and that should not include sending New York employees around the country to lobby for Bloomberg’s pet projects.”
The request was filed by SAF Special Projects Director Philip Watson, for the following information:
1. All electronic records related to Mayors Against Illegal Guns and the website MayorsAgainstIllegalGuns.org, including, but not limited to:
a. All electronic files saved on city servers
b. All Emails to or from users at the domain MayorsAgainstIllegalGuns.org
c. All current and former employees, officials, outside contractors, and volunteers with access to the website MayorsAgainstIllegalGuns.org
d. All current and former Email users and usernames that have had access to send or receive Email from @MayorsAgainstIllegalGuns.org
2. Any and all records related to Mayors Against Illegal Guns electronic files, including, but not limited to:
a. Emails
b. Any written documents
c. Any records describing processes for cooperation with this group
d. Any records describing how received communications with this group are processed
e. All employee pay or overtime related to cooperation or time spent with this group
f. Official names, titles, and contact information of all employees, officials, outside contractors, and volunteers involved with domain hosting, creation, maintenance, and communication for MayorsAgainstIllegalGuns.org
g. All costs incurred by the City of New York for creation, maintenance, domain hosting, and communication for MayorsAgainstIllegalGuns.org
3. Any and all records of communication since January 1, 2002 between any city official, employee, or volunteer and any gun control advocacy organization, including, but not limited to:
a. Mayors Against Illegal Guns
b. Demand A Plan
c. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
d. Center for Gun Policy and Research
e. Ceasefire
f. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence
g. Coalition to Stop Gun Violence
h. Joyce Foundation
i. Violence Policy Center
j. Legal Community Against Violence
k. Million Mom March
“The man is obsessed,” Gottlieb continued, “and if he’s spent so much as a dime of public money on what amounts to a private crusade, Mayor Bloomberg needs to be held accountable for that.”
Gottlieb has called on New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to launch a full-scale investigation into the mayor’s potential misuse of public resources for his own private war on gun owners. He renewed that call today.
“If Eric Schneiderman won’t investigate Bloomberg for possible misuse of public funds,” Gottlieb said, “we will. The mayor has been acting increasingly like a self-appointed monarch, but this still the United States, not Bloomberg’s personal fiefdom.”
best pro 2A video since… some MrColionnior video. good real life examples of laws serving their purpose, keeping the best practical self defense tool out of those ny, dc, and ill residence hands. i hope all 3 of them move to AZ. it would be for the children.
agreed.
*slow clap*
Now let’s see if any legal action is ever actually taken. This is only the beginning of the battle.
Seconded.
I was doing the happy dance when I read the SAF release!
Ok you don’t want to watch me doing the happy dance, but you get the idea!!
I might. Might be sorry, but who knows?
It is a bold move enabled by the use of NYC resources to host and run the servers. They are basically asking for every email from or to anyone – including the entire anti-gun establishment – that touched an email address from one of the city-hosted servers. This will light off some fireworks. If they win this one, it is huge from a simple intelligence-gathering exercise, if nothing else.
The intel piece may be the most valuable. Otherwise, if Bloomie gets in trouble for using city resources, he’ll just write a check for whatever it costs and try to get out of discovery.
“The intel piece may be the most valuable.”
Almost certainly; 10 years of candid communication between some of the biggest names in gun control would be priceless.
That was a great video. My SAF membership was worth watching this alone. Please click through to Youtube to increase the video’s viewing numbers. Thanks.
The opening video highlights the subtle racism of gun control in a not too obvious way.
I know it won’t happen, but I’d love to see Bloomberg go to jail over this.
Napoleon go to jail? Fat chance. They’ll exile him to MA first.
A tiny jail. He’s be able to squeeze between the bars of any regular joint.
Ideally we would hold all politicians, police officers, Wall St. bankers, etc. criminally accountable rather than letting them break the law or violate the Constitution with no consequences. However, I don’t see that happening any time soon.
Question for the lawyers of the forum. If the people of NYC decide they do not give a rats a&& that their tax dollars are being used for this, can it still go to court and (if so) have a chance?
I’m no lawyer, but this is not about New Yorker’s opinions.
Maybe I am missunderstanding but the main base of this investigation is missapropriation of funds and city employees is it not? So would the people of NY not have the ulitmate say in pursuit of this?
As individual citizens, not in any criminal arena. Only the State or the Municipality can bring criminal charges.
Okay, the let me change my question a bit. If the SAF gets the information they want, then would it be up to the city and state to pursue it? If so how bad are the odds that anything would be done?
Dont get me wrong, Im not trying to be a pessimist and I give the SAF a lot of credit for this. Im just wondering if it has a chance of going far.
If the SAF gets the information they want, then would it be up to the city and state to pursue it?
Yes it would.
how bad are the odds that anything would be done?
You know all those casinos in Las Vegas? The Nevada Gaming Commission wouldn’t let them offered a proposition bet with odds that bad.
And suddenly, some poor NYC IT tech is madly typing, “BAHLETED… No… DERETED…no…DELETED! That’s the one!”
“Gun control is Bloomberg’s pet peeve,”…
I think that’s “pet project”; a pet peeve is kind of opposite of that.
NY FOIL requires a grant or deny response in full or part within five days. I can’t wait to see that response.
They are asking for a potentially large amount of records. NY City can charge SAF for the cost of producing those records. That could end up being expensive. If NY City has a decent records retention policy it would be difficult to get info all the way back to 2002.
It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.
Lifetime membership to SAF worth every dime.
Very affordable, too, at only $150:
http://www.saf.org/default.asp?p=safdonation
I think they’ve earned my money on this one.
The SAF: Breaking gungrabbers b@lls one tiny pair at a time.
Liberals actually do want equal gun rights. Which means no guns for all… except for a tyrannical government.
I would love to see the records, transactions, and communication between MAIG, Bloomberg, and Headwaters Strategies in Denver to see just how much of the recent gun control legislation here was influenced, written by, or simply handed to CO State legislators. In addition, when the open hearings were held, the gun control side (although VASTLY outnumbered) featured CT parents and Mark Kelly while the gun rights side featured actual Colorado residents. Who paid for those appearances? How did they get there? Where did they stay and who paid the bills? I have no problem with the open political process. I VEHEMENTLY oppose out of state money and influence swaying my state’s laws.
Also, what are the laws concerning a sitting public official (Bloomberg) in one state essentially running his own PAC funneling money to other jurisdictions?
Seems to me the only thing the article got wrong is that mayor B is a self appointed monarch. He is obviously more like a duke, managing his territory for king O.
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